If you want to use programs with graphical user interface, then follow

If you want to use programs with graphical user interface, then follow

−

[[Optical_Disc_Drive#Burning_CD.2FDVD_with_a_GUI|this link to the list of GUI programs]].

+

[[Optical_Disc_Drive#Burning_CD.2FDVD.2FBD_with_a_GUI|this link to the list of GUI programs]].

The programs listed here are the back ends which are used by most free GUI programs for CD, DVD, and BD. They are command line oriented. GUI users might get to them when it comes to troubleshooting or to scripting of burn activities.

The programs listed here are the back ends which are used by most free GUI programs for CD, DVD, and BD. They are command line oriented. GUI users might get to them when it comes to troubleshooting or to scripting of burn activities.

In computing, an optical disc drive (ODD) is a disk drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some drives can only read from discs, but recent drives are commonly both readers and recorders, also called burners or writers. Compact discs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are common types of optical media which can be read and recorded by such drives. Optical drive is the generic name; drives are usually described as "CD" "DVD", or "Blu-ray", followed by "drive", "writer", etc.

Burning

The burning process of optical disc drives consists of creating or obtaining an image and writing it to an optical medium. The image may in principle be any data file. If you want to mount the resulting medium, then it is usually an ISO 9660 filesystem image file. Audio and multi-media CDs are often burned from a BIN file, under control of a TOC file or a CUE file which tell the desired track layout.

Install burning utilities

The programs listed here are the back ends which are used by most free GUI programs for CD, DVD, and BD. They are command line oriented. GUI users might get to them when it comes to troubleshooting or to scripting of burn activities.

You need at least one program for creation of filesystem images and one program that is able to burn data onto your desired media type.

The traditional choices are wodim for CD and growisofs for DVD and Blu-ray Disk. For growisofs and BD-R see the bug workaround below.
For writing TOC/CUE/BIN files to CD, install cdrdao.

The free GUI programs for CD, DVD, and BD burning depend on at least one of the above packages.

The programs genisoimage, mkisofs, and xorrisofs all three support the genisoimage options which are shown in this document.

The programs cdrecord, cdrskin, and wodim all three support the shown wodim options. Program xorrecord supports those which do not deal with audio CD.

Note:

The installed files of packages cdrkit and cdrtools are in conflict.
If you want to install cdrtools, make sure that you build a package using makepkg and install with pacman. Pacman wrappers may resolve to cdrkit instead.

Making an ISO image from existing files on hard disk

The most simple way to create an ISO image by help of genisoimage is to copy the needed files to one folder ./for_iso and to do:

$ genisoimage -V "ARCHIVE_2013_07_27" -J -r -o isoimage.iso ./for_iso

The meaning of the options is:

-V

Gives the filesystem a name which will probably show up as mount point if the medium is mounted automatically. The ISO specs allow only "A" to "Z", "0" to "9", and "_". 32 characters at most.

-J

Prepares names of up to 64 UTF-16 characters for MS-Windows readers. Aka "Joliet".

-joliet-long

Would allow 103 UTF-16 characters for MS-Windows readers. Not conformant to Joliet specs.

-r

Prepares names of up to 255 characters for Unix readers and gives read permission for everybody. Aka "Rock Ridge".

-o

Sets the file path for the resulting ISO image.

You can let genisoimage collect files and directories from various paths

Enables the recognition of "pathspecs" which consist of a target address in the ISO filesystem (e.g. "/photos") and a source address on hard disk (e.g. "/home/me/photos"). Both are separated by a = character.

So this example puts disk directory /home/me/photos into ISO as directory /photos, disk directory /home/me/mail into ISO as /mail, and /home/me/holidays/photos into ISO as /photos/holidays.

Programs mkisofs and xorrisofs accept the same options. For sincere backups consider to use xorrisofs with option --for_backup, which records eventual ACLs and stores an MD5 checksum for each data file.

Converting img/ccd to an ISO image

Learning the name of your optical drive

For the remainder of this section the name of your recording device is assumed to be /dev/cdrw.

Check this by

$ wodim dev=/dev/cdrw -checkdrive

which should report "Vendor_info" and "Identification" of the drive.
The next guess could be /dev/sr0.

If no drive is found, check whether any /dev/sr* exist and whether they offer rw-permission to you or your group.
If no /dev/sr* exists then try

# modprobe sr_mod

Reading an ISO image from a CD, DVD, or BD

You should determine the size of the ISO filesystem before copying it to hard disk. Most media types deliver more data than was written to them with the most recent burn run.

Use program isosize out of package util-linux to obtain the image size

$ blocks=$(expr $(isosize /dev/cdrw) / 2048)

Have a look whether the obtained number of blocks is plausible

$ echo "That would be $(expr $blocks / 512) MB"

That would be 589 MB

Then copy the determined amount of data from medium to hard disk

$ dd if=/dev/cdrw of=isoimage.iso bs=2048 count=$blocks

Omit count=$blocks if you did not determine the size. You will probably get more data than needed. The resulting file will nevertheless be mountable. It should still fit onto a medium of the same type as the medium from which the
image was copied.

If the original medium was bootable, then the copy will be a bootable image. You may use it as pseudo CD for a virtual machine or burn it onto optical media which should then become bootable.

Erasing CD-RW and DVD-RW

Used CD-RW media need to be erased before you can write over the previously recorded data. This is done by

$ wodim -v dev=/dev/cdrw blank=fast

Unformatted DVD-RW media need the same treatment before re-use. But fast blanking deprives them of the capability for multi-session and recording of streams of unpredicted length. So one should apply

$ dvd+rw-format -blank=full /dev/cdrw

dvd+rw-format is part of package dvd+rw-tools. Alternative commands are

All other media are either write-once (CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R, BD-R) or are overwritable without the need for erasing (DVD-RAM, DVD+RW, BD-RE).

Burning an ISO image to CD, DVD, or BD

To burn a readily prepared ISO image file isoimage.iso onto an optical medium, run for CD:

$ wodim -v -sao dev=/dev/cdrw isoimage.iso

and for DVD or BD:

$ growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/cdrw=isoimage.iso

The programs cdrecord, cdrskin, and xorrecord may be used on all kinds of media with the options shown with wodim.

Note:

Make sure that the medium is not mounted when you begin to write to it.
Mounting may happen automatically if the medium contains a readable filesystem. In best case it will prevent the burn programs from using the burner device. In worst case there will be misburns because read operations disturbed the drive.
So if in doubt, do:

# umount /dev/cdrw

Note:

growisofs has a small bug with blank BD-R media. It issues an error message after the burning is complete. Programs like k3b then believe the whole burn run failed.
To prevent this, either

format the blank BD-R by dvd+rw-format /dev/cdrw before submitting it to growisofs

or use growisofs option -use-the-force-luke=spare:none

Verifying the burnt ISO image

You can verify the integrity of the burnt medium to make sure it contains no errors. Always eject the medium and reinsert it before verifying. The kernel will learn about the new content only by that reinsertion.

First calculate the md5sum of the original ISO image:

$ md5sum isoimage.iso

e5643e18e05f5646046bb2e4236986d8 isoimage.iso

Next calculate the md5sum of the ISO filesystem on the medium.
Although some media types deliver exactly the same amount of data as have been submitted to the burn program, many others append trailing garbage when being read. So you should restrict reading to the size of the ISO image file.

Both runs should yield the same MD5 sum (here: e5643e18e05f5646046bb2e4236986d8). If they do not, you will propbably also get an i/o error message from the dd run. dmesg might then tell about SCSI errors and block numbers, if you are interested.

ISO 9660 and Burning On-The-Fly

It is not necessary to store an emerging ISO filesystem on hard disk before writing it to optical media. Only very old CD drives at very old computers could suffer misburns due to empty drive buffer.

If you omit option -o from genisoimage then it writes the ISO image to standard output. This can be piped into the standard input of burn programs.

Option -waiti is not really needed here. It prevents wodim from writing to the medium before genisoimage starts its output. This would allow genisoimage to read the medium without disturbing an already started burn run. See next section about multi-session.

On DVD and BD you may letgrowisofs operate genisoimage for you and burn its output on-the-fly

Multi-session

ISO 9660 multi-session means that a medium with readable filesystem is still writable at its first unused block address, and that a new ISO directory tree gets written to this unused part.
The new tree is accompanied by the content blocks of newly added or overwritten data files. The blocks of data files, which shall stay as in the old ISO tree, will not be written again.

Linux and many other operating systems will mount the directory tree in the last session on the medium. This youngest tree will normally show the files of the older sessions, too.

Multi-session by wodim

CD-R and CD-RW stay writable (aka "appendable") if wodim option -multi was used

$ wodim -v -multi dev=/dev/cdrw isoimage.iso

Then the medium can be inquired for the parameters of the next session

$ m=$(wodim dev=/dev/cdrw -msinfo)

By help of these parameters and of the readable medium in the drive you can produce the add-on ISO session

Programs cdrskin and xorrecord do this too with DVD-R, DVD+R, BD-R and unformatted DVD-RW. Program cdrecord does multi-session with at least DVD-R and DVD-RW. They all do with CD-R and CD-RW, of course.

Most re-usable media types do not record a session history that would be recognizable for a mounting kernel. But with ISO 9660 it is possible to achieve the multi-session effect even on those media.

growisofs and xorriso can do this and hide most of the complexity.

Multi-session by growisofs

growisofs forwards most of its program arguments to a program that is compatible to mkisofs. See above examples of genisoimage.
It bans option -o and deprecates option -C.
By default it uses the installed program named "mkisofs". You may let it choose one of the others by setting environment variable MKISOFS

$ export MKISOFS="genisoimage"
$ export MKISOFS="xorrisofs"

The wish to begin with a new ISO filesystem on the optical medium is expressed by option -Z

$ growisofs -Z /dev/cdrw -V "ARCHIVE_2013_07_27" -r -J ./for_iso

The wish to append more files as new session to an existing ISO filesystem is expressed by option -M

Multi-session by xorriso

xorriso learns the wish to begin with a new ISO filesystem from the blank state of the medium. So it is appropriate to blank it if it contains data. The command -blank as_needed applies to all kinds of re-usable media and even to ISO images in data files on hard disk. It does not cause error if applied to a blank write-once medium.

BD Defect Management

BD-RE and formatted BD-R media are normally written with enabled Defect Management. This feature reads the written blocks while they are still stored in the drive buffer. In case of poor read quality the blocks get written again or redirected to the Spare Area where the data get stored in replacement blocks.

This checkreading reduces write speed to at most half of the nominal speed of drive and BD medium. Sometimes it is even worse. Heavy use of the Spare Area causes long delays during read operations. So Defect Management is not always desirable.

cdrecord does not format BD-R. It has no means to prevent Defect Management on BD-RE media, though.

growisofs formats BD-R by default. This can be prevented by option -use-the-force-luke=spare:none. It has no means to prevent Defect Management on BD-RE media, though.

Name the audio files in a manner that will cause them to be listed in the desired track order when listed alphabetically, such as 01.wav, 02.wav, 03.wav, etc.
Use the following command to simulate burning the wav files as an audio CD:

$ wodim -dummy -v -pad speed=1 dev=/dev/cdrw -dao -swab *.wav

In case you detect errors or empty tracks like:

Track 01: audio 0 MB (00:00.00) no preemp pad

try another decoder (e.g. mpg123) or try using cdrecord from the cdrtools package.

Note that cdrkit also contains a cdrecord command but it is just a softlink to wodim.
If anything worked you can remove the dummy flag to really burn the CD

Some software only likes CUE/BIN pair, you can make a CUE sheet with toc2cue (part of cdrdao):

$ toc2cue IMAGE.toc IMAGE.cue

Burn Backend Problems

If you experience problems, you may ask for advise at mailing list cdwrite@other.debian.org . Or ask for advise at the support mail addresses if some are listed near the end of the program's man page.

Tell the command lines you tried, the medium type (e.g. CD-R, DVD+RW, ...), and the symptoms of failure (program messages, disappointed user expectation, ...).
You will possibly get asked to obtain the newest release or development version of the affected program and to make test runs. But the answer might as well be, that your drive dislikes the particular medium.

Translators: What advise do you have for people who cannot communicate in english language ?

Burning CD/DVD/BD with a GUI

Free GUI programs

Template:Wikipedia
There are several applications available to burn CDs in a graphical environment.

Nero Linux

Nero Linux is a commercial burning suite from makers of Nero for Windows - Nero AG. The biggest advantage of Nero linux is its interface which similar to window version. Hence, users migrating from windows might find it easy to operate. The Linux version now includes Nero Express, a wizard which takes users through the process of burning CDs and DVDs step-by-step, which users will be familiar with from the Windows version. Also new in version 4 is Blu-ray Disc defect management, integration of Isolinux for creating bootable media and support for Musepack and AIFF audio formats...

Nero Linux 4 retails at £17.99 with a free trial version also available.

DVD players

MPlayer

MPlayer is efficient and supports a wide variety of media formats (i.e. almost everything). To play a DVD with MPlayer:

$ mplayer dvd://N

...where N is the desired chapter number. Start at 1 and work up if unsure.

Mplayer checks /dev/dvd by default. Tell it to use /dev/sr0 with the dvd-device option at the command line, or the dvd-device variable in ~/.mplayer/config.

To play a DVD image file:

$ mplayer -dvd-device movie.iso dvd://N

To enable the DVD menu use (NOTE: you use arrow keys to navigate and the Template:Keypress key to choose):

$ mplayer dvdnav://

To enable mouse support in DVD menus use:

$ mplayer -mouse-movements dvdnav://

To find the audio language, start MPlayer with the -v switch to output audio IDs. An audio track is selected with -aid <audio_id>. Set a default audio language by editing ~/.mplayer/config and adding the line alang=en for English.

With MPlayer, the DVD could be set to a low volume. To increase the maximum volume to 400%, use softvol=yes and softvol-max=400. The startup volume defaults to 100% of software volume and the global mixer levels will remain untouched. Using the 9 and 0 keys, volume can be adjusted between 0 and 400 percent.

Some utilities perform both tasks, whilst others focus on one aspect or the other.

dvdbackup

dvdbackup is used simply for data extraction, and does not transcode. This tool is useful for creating exact copies of encrypted DVDs in conjunction with libdvdcss or for decrypting video for other utilities unable to read encrypted DVDs.

dvd::rip

dvd::rip is a front-end to transcode, used to extract and transcode on-the-fly.

The following packages should be installed:

dvdrip: GTK front-end for transcode, which performs the ripping and encoding

Ripping a DVD is often a simple matter of selecting the preferred codec(s), selecting the desired titles, then clicking the "Rip" button.

FFmpeg

FFmpeg is capable to do a direct rip in any format (audio/video) from a DVD-Video .iso image, just select the input as the *.iso image and proceed with the desired options. It also allows to downmixing, shrinking, spliting, selecting streams among other features.

HandBrake

HandBrake is a multithreaded video transcoder, which offers both a graphical and command-line interface with many preset configurations. The package is available in the official repositories: handbrake.

MEncoder

MEncoder is a free command line video decoding, encoding and filtering tool released under the GNU General Public License. It is a close sibling to MPlayer and can convert all the formats that MPlayer understands into a variety of compressed and uncompressed formats using different codecs. Wrapper programs like h264encAUR and undvdAUR can provide an assistive interface.

Hybrid

Hybrid is a multi platform (Linux/Mac OS X/Windows) Qt based frontend for a bunch of other tools which can convert nearly every input to x264/Xvid/VP8 + ac3/ogg/mp3/aac/flac inside an mp4/m2ts/mkv/webm/mov/avi container, a Blu-ray or an AVCHD structure.

DVD-VR

The DVD-VR standard defines a logical format for video recording on DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD-RAM style media, including the dual layer versions of these media. As opposed to media recorded with the DVD+VR recording standard, the resulting media are not DVD-Video compliant, and will not play back in some DVD-Video players. Most DVD video recorders in the market that support DVD-R, DVD-RW, or DVD-RAM media will allow recording to these media in DVD-VR mode, as well as in a DVD-Video compliant mode. It is possible to use the DVD-VR format with DVD+R and DVD+RW media, but no examples are known other than some PC based recording utilities.

.VRO files extracted from a DVD-VR can be easily converted and splitted in regular .VOB files using the DVD-VR program.

Troubleshooting

K3b locale error

When running K3B, if the following message appears:

System locale charset is ANSI_X3.4-1968
Your system's locale charset (i.e. the charset used to encode file names) is
set to ANSI_X3.4-1968. It is highly unlikely that this has been done intentionally.
Most likely the locale is not set at all. An invalid setting will result in
problems when creating data projects.Solution: To properly set the locale
charset make sure the LC_* environment variables are set. Normally the distribution
setup tools take care of this.

Brasero fails to find blank discs

Brasero fails to normalize audio CD

If you try to burn it may stop at the first step called Normalization.

As a workaround you can disable the normalization plugin using the Edit > Plugins menu

VLC: Error "... could not open the disc /dev/dvd"

If you get the error, "vlc dvdread could not open the disc "/dev/dvd"" it may be because there is no device node /dev/dvd on your system. Udev no longer creates /dev/dvd and instead uses /dev/sr0. To fix this edit the VLC configuration file (~/.config/vlc/vlcrc):

# DVD device (string)
dvd=/dev/sr0

DVD drive is noisy

If playing DVD videos causes the system to be very loud, it may be because the disk is spinning faster than it needs to. To temporarily change the speed of the drive, as root, run:

# eject -x 12 /dev/dvd

sometimes:

# hdparm -E12 /dev/dvd

Any speed that is supported by the drive can be used, or 0 for the maximum speed.

Playback does not work with new computer (new DVD-Drive)

If playback does not work and you have a new computer (new DVD-Drive) the reason might be that the region code is not set. You can read and set the region code with regionsetAUR from the Arch User Repository.

None of the above programs are able to rip/encode a DVD to my hard disk!

Make sure the region of your DVD-reader is set correctly, otherwise you will get loads of unexplainable CSS-related errors. Use regionsetAUR to do so.

GUI program log indicates problems with backend program

If you use a GUI program and experience problems which the program's log blames on some backend program, then try to reproduce the problem by the logged backend program arguments.
Whether you succeed with reproducing or not, you may report the logged lines and your own findings to the places mentioned in section Burn Backend Problems.

See some typical messages about the drive disliking the medium, which can only be solved by using a different drive or a different medium. A different program will hardly help.